Spirit Rising: My Life, My Music

By Angélique Kidjo, Rachel Wenrick, Desmond Tutu and Alicia Keys

Grammy Award-winning singer Angélique Kidjo is known for her electrifying voice and fearless advocacy work. In this intimate memoir, she reveals how she escaped Communist Africa to make her dreams a reality, and how she's prompting others all around the world to reach for theirs as well.

Born in the West African nation of Benin, Angélique Kidjo grew up surrounded by the rich sounds, rhythms, and storytelling of traditional Beninese culture. When the Communists took over, they silenced her dynamic culture and demanded that she sing in praise of them. In Spirit Rising: My Life, My Music, Angélique reveals the details of her dangerous escape into France, and how she rose from poverty to become a Grammy Award–winning artist and an international sensation at the top of Billboard's World Albums chart. She also explains why it's important to give back by sharing stories from her work as a UNICEF ambassador and as founder of the Batonga Foundation, which gives African girls access to education.

Desmond Tutu has contributed the foreword to this remarkable volume; Alicia Keys has provided an introduction. Her eloquent, inspiring narrative is paired with more than one hundred colorful photographs documenting Angélique's life and experiences, as well as a sampling of recipes that has sustained her on her remarkable odyssey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9780062288479

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

ready for the revolution

My ancestors on my father’s side came from the village of Ouidah, not far from the Atlantic Ocean, and just a few dozen miles from Cotonou. My family are descendants of the Pedah, a tribe of fishermen who cast their nets all along the magnificent, immaculate beach that goes on for miles and miles. Ouidah holds a tragic place in history. It was from there that so many slaves were forced to leave their continent for the Americas.

On the way to the sea, there is a red clay road that leaves the village and crosses a beautiful green salted backwater. The slaves were forced to take this path, and at the end to leave for an uncertain future. Before they got on the boats, they had to walk around a tree—seven times for women, nine times for men—it was believed that this would erase their memories, that it would make them forget where they came from. Now there is a tall arch called the Gate of No Return to commemorate this dark page of human history.

The Gate of No Return.

Sophie Langlois

The road the slaves had to take when they were forced onto the boats, leaving their loved ones behind.

Sophie Langlois

Fishermen pulling their net from the sea.

Sophie Langlois

Sitting on the beautiful and empty beach of Ouidah.

Sophie Langlois

The beach at Ouidah is mystical, powerful, very peaceful—those three things together. It is empty today except for some fishermen. If you want to be with yourself and look for inner truth, inner peace, this is where you go.

You can see the fishermen going out in the long canoes that have been used for generations. At the edge of the pirogue there is a hole they thread with handmade hemp rope. They tie the rope to a tree because they have to head out to where the fish are—in deep waters beyond a reef of sand, beyond a whirlpool, beyond the sharks—and if you go too far you can’t come back. They cast their net from the boat and spend the day fishing. Before sunset, people line the beach to begin pulling them back. It’s teamwork. Family work. While they do this, they sing. Even though their clothes are now modern—yellow T-shirts and red baseball caps bob along the blue-green water—their rhythm is ancient. Like the waves of the sea, it is a call and response.

A sculpture by the Beninese artist Cyprien Tokoudagba that depicts a slave who has been bound by chains.

Sophie Langlois

This was the daily life of my ancestors too.

My dad was a Fon, which is the main ethnic group in Benin, and my mom is a Yoruba, another important one with roots in Nigeria. The Fon and Yoruba have very similar gods, but with different names. Heviosso, the god of thunder for the Fon, is the famous Shango for the Yoruba. There is Ogun who is the Yoruba god of metal and Legba the Fon god who is the messenger for all of them. There is also Mami Wata, as she is called in Fon, the white and blue goddess of the sea whom the Yoruba call Yemandja. There are so many deities and together they create a pantheon as rich and beautiful as that of the Greeks and Romans.

The Fon and Yoruba share the same message of love, but the Fon religion has a very unfortunate name, Vodun. In the West, there is a sad misconception about voodoo. Most people think it’s about sacrificing chickens and cows, casting spells, and getting revenge; all you see is blood and dolls stuck with pins. Voodoo from New Orleans and Haiti is very different from the Beninese traditional religion and has been vilified by Hollywood as the archetype of the scary African people ruling Haiti, the first black republic that dared to stand up against the West. In Benin, Vodun is not an evil form of witchcraft, but just one among a great many African animist religions that have existed for centuries.

Having a Fon dad and a Yoruba mom put me in a special place. It gave me access to so much culture and music. The songs and dances and the ceremonies are different, but they have coexisted for hundreds of years. Their beliefs are also never in contradiction with Christianity, which is a mainstay of Beninese culture. In my family, as in many Beninese families, we go to the Catholic church on Sunday morning and to the traditional Beninese ceremony in the afternoon. Each child born into our family has the right to two baptisms: a Catholic baptism and a traditional one, which is more about lineage. It is when we call to our ancestors to ask who will protect and watch over the child throughout his or her earthly life.

I learned the story of my baptism, like all of our family history, through its telling and retelling.

It isn’t written.

In Benin, we don’t have genealogy the way Westerners think of it. Our genealogy takes the form of a family tree in three dimensions that’s kept in a special place called the asen room. In my family this room is like a small round hut built with red clay. It’s inside the courtyard of our ancestral home, on a small street near the market of Ouidah where my father’s family is from. The roof is corrugated metal and the ceiling is low, so you have to bend down to enter.

An asen is a little metal pedestal, used as a kind of altar. Every time someone dies, the person is represented by a small, delicate metal figure with a symbol connected to their name, or a proverb that defined them, or the profession he or she practiced. For example, my father’s sister, who took over their mother’s cloth business, is represented with scissors in her hands. The figures go back for generations and generations—ever since our family’s origin, at least three centuries ago—so the room is filled with them. The statues rust in the sea air and get coated with clay dust, but the room is never swept because the belief is that the dust is part of the asen, part of the spirit of the person. When the asen falls and shatters, the person’s spirit will still live on forever.

My father calls it our little pantheon.

I was baptized when I was two months old. My mom and I stayed in the asen room for seven days. But first the tanyin, my aunties, had to prepare everything. They used a branch from a palm tree to sweep the rest of the house and the path to the asen room. Palm trees and their leaves are considered sacred in our culture. Through their deep roots, the trees are a link to our ancestors. Sweeping with the branch serves as a connection between the earth and the ones up there. It’s like starting a conversation with them.

We both wore a necklace and bracelet of braided palm fronds. We do these things to clean and protect the mother and baby and to keep the ancestors close from the day of our birth until our death.

There is always one main tanyin and her voice is the link to the world of the spirits and gods. At my baptism, the main tanyin was the one we called the Nightingale because she had such a beautiful voice and an uplifting spirit. When I was a girl and I asked my mother why I sang all the time, she told me that when she was pregnant with me, this aunt used to come to the city to visit her and she would sing—right against her belly. She was the guardian of our family’s songs.

It was the Nightingale’s job to call to the ancestors and ask them for the traditional name that would link me to one particular ancestor. It was all joy, singing, and dancing, questioning the ancestors and celebrating.

The men had to stay outside, away from the door and the window—only the women could see my mother until the name was given. My father, my uncles, and our family friends were clapping their hands and beating their chests, and hitting glass bottles with spoons. Through this music, the men and women replied to each other. They danced, too, in celebration of what our ancestors have created—our family, which we love.

Wassi wassi wassi wassi Houeda nou vio: We are so happy happy happy to welcome the child from the lineage of Houeda. Houeda is the python god, the tutelary deity of my family.

Me as a baby; same haircut and already an attitude.

Franck Kidjo

Allou wa sio Owo Owo Owo Vi Do Le: We are witnessing the gift of life of a child.

From inside the asen room, my mother heard the voices and she sang along in a whisper.

During the baptism, a necklace of cowries is thrown down like dice on a chalk-covered tray. Their arrangement provides the answer to the question asked of the spirits: Who will guide this child? The Fa priest calls to the spirits every day until they consent to respond. When an ancestor responds to the priest and accepts the role of protective spirit of a child, he comes with his own principles. These serve as guides for the child’s life.

For my baptism, the legend goes that from the first of the seven days, and each day after, one spirit answered again and again: my ancestor Linhounhinto. At first they thought maybe it was a mistake. By the end they were in shock. It’s a male! they kept repeating. I was the first girl in more than five generations who had a male protective ancestor.

The asen room. Each altar represents a scene that symbolizes the life of an ancestor.

Sophie Langlois

In my family, we are named after our ancestors. Linhounhinto is a descendant of Hounsinou Kandjo Manta Zogbin, a warrior on my grandfather’s side of the family. If you combine his name with Kpasselokohinto, who is from my grandmother’s side of the family, you get my full given name, Angélique Hounsinou Kandjo Manta Zogbin-Kpasselokohinto Kidjo.

During his lifetime they say Linhounhinto lived according to very strict principles. I’ve been told that he advised me to be wary of my own anger. He also predicted that throughout my life I’d have to earn all my success and salary by the sweat of my brow. Nothing would be given to me effortlessly. Now, whenever I face a new challenge, I already know it’s going to be hard work for me, and I just want to get started.

But the thing that everyone was really impressed with was that Linhounhinto was one of our most honest ancestors. He didn’t know how to lie. My husband has said that this honesty of mine can be embarrassing at times, but he also tells me that I can speak to a reality—a simple truth—that people might not want to address. For me it’s that I can’t help speaking about the elephant in the room. When I make blunders or loudly say what everybody is silently thinking, people may be quiet for a moment, but then they usually laugh and it feels as if a tension has been